


Falling Down To Fade Away

by depressaria



Series: So Much It Aches [2]
Category: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Community: hc_bingo, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 16:25:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11361171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: "Sometimes we do the right thing for the right reasons and we still have to deal with the consequences.”The fledgling and Heather attempt to repair their relationship while evading a blood hunt and dealing with Heather’s recent undeath.





	Falling Down To Fade Away

**Author's Note:**

> For the ‘forgiveness’ square on my hc_bingo card. Title from Smaller God, of course. This can probably stand alone, but will make more sense if you read the first story in this series! 
> 
> Inspired in part by UncannyPrincess’s comments on the first story re: kindred!Heather. Thank you so much for your feedback and for the inspiration! 
> 
> Warnings, as required by hc_bingo:
> 
> Angst, unhealthy relationships of an ill-defined nature, implied suicidal ideation, angst over vampiric eating habits which may be interpreted as disordered eating, descriptions of blood/gore

Even as a human, she’d hated driving. Hated the idea of being in control of a few thousand pounds of metal, of being responsible for keeping it from spinning out or spontaneously combusting, of knowing that death awaited if she stopped paying attention for even a second. 

The embrace hadn’t changed her feelings any. If anything, they’d made her hate driving even more. Bad enough she had to live like a parasite, totally unable to survive without harming others. Bad enough that she could kill people with her brain. She didn’t need to be behind the wheel any more than she needed a machete or a flamethrower. 

Yet there she was, barreling her way down an icy road, fervently trying not to think about what would happen if she didn’t find somewhere to bunker down before the sun came up.

It’d be one thing if it were just her. The half-dead woman in the backseat changed things a little.

She nearly crashed the car when, a little before sunrise, Heather sat bolt upright in the backseat, breathing in rough gasps that neither of them needed anymore. 

In the rearview mirror, she could see Heather looking around, realizing where she was. Whatever comfort knowing where she was gave her, it seemed to evaporate when she looked down and saw the blood drying on her torn shirt. 

“I’m sorry,” the fledgling said by way of greeting. “It was the only way to save you.” 

Still looking down at her ruined shirt, Heather ran a finger experimentally over her newly sharp canines. “You turned me.” 

“They call it something dorky like the embrace, but, yeah.” 

Heather turned to look at her then, and her face was just… different. Which she’d expected, of course—as much as she’d had time to expect anything—but there was almost nothing there of the ghoul who’d hung on her every word these past few weeks, or even of the girl she’d found bleeding out in the clinic. This face was sharp and solemn, once-expressive green eyes dead and hungry. 

~*~*~*~

They stopped at an abandoned farmhouse, and the fledging gave Heather the last two blood packs in her duffel bag. Heather tore into them with significantly more restraint than the fledgling had torn into her first meal. 

“They were trying to send a message to me,” the fledgling said as Heather finished off the second blood pack. “That they—I don’t know, that they know how to track me, or something. I guess they think you’re dead now. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault and I’m just. Sorry.”

Heather just kept watching her expectantly. 

She shifted uncomfortably from where she was sitting on the bed across from Heather, and added, “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’m dead,” Heather said shortly. 

It hit her like a punch to the gut. “Oh.” 

“I just…” Heather set aside the drained blood packs and scrubbed a hand over her face. “It’s just all jumbled, okay? One minute I’m sitting in that ugly motel room, not a care in the world except when you’d walk through the door, then the door opens and it’s not you and I’m… gutted, I guess. Then I wake up in the back of a car and everything’s sharper and brighter and I. Didn’t care.”

“… About anything?”

“About the fact that you were there with me.” 

Five minutes into undeath and Heather was hitting her where it hurt. “Oh,” she said again, feeling slow and stupid and… rather defunct, actually.

“That came out wrong,” Heather said. “I don’t mean that I don’t care about you. It’s just not… all-encompassing? I don’t know how to explain. I’m tired and hungry and still not entirely convinced this entire thing hasn’t been one long, weirdly vivid dream.”

All along, she’d wanted the blood bond dissolved. But it just made her feel like shit. And then she felt like shit for feeling like shit about it, because how fucking pathetic could she get? She spent weeks wishing she could give Heather a better life so that she could go off and play lone wolf guilt-free, and once she finally got her wish—or the closest thing to it—all she could think was that it really had been meaningless all along. 

Which was fitting, she guessed, because it wasn’t like anything else in her life had been all that profound. She didn’t want to be so melodramatic, but she had to call them as she saw them. 

Instead of the myriad other things she wanted to say, she said, “Get some sleep.”

~*~*~*~

Finding food was at once harder and easier. Harder because now they were both kindred, with all the limitations that entailed, but occasionally easier because hunting was more effective with two people. On her own, the fledgling had been lucky to catch rats, but together they managed to occasionally take down a deer.

Of course, she had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it was great to manage to get through a night or two without the constant hunger feeling like it was burning a hole through her chest. On the other hand, she didn’t feel quite right about eating Bambi’s mom. 

Heather, for her part, never complained. 

They carefully avoided talking about the circumstances that had led up to their current situation.

~*~*~*~

“So you can do stuff, right? Psychic stuff?” 

“Yeah,” the fledgling said, not looking away from the passenger side window. She still hated driving, but Heather didn’t seem to mind taking the wheel, and there was something eerie and soothing about the interstate at night. The endless, perfect line of it, the fields beyond its curb too dark for even kindred eyes to see. 

“So I could too?”

“I mean, I would assume so.” She tried not to think about Lily and the other thin-bloods, too vampiric to live as kine, but possessing few of the perks. 

“The next time we get a chance, you should teach me. If only to keep me from making someone’s brains leak out their ears by accident.”

She looked over, then, and Heather was carefully watching the road instead of her. Which would be a normal and good thing, except for the fact that tension was written in every line of her body and her face was so carefully casual that it almost looked painful. She was making an effort. 

“Yeah, okay,” the fledgling said. “I mean, I don’t really know how to teach it. No one was around to teach me so I kind of just winged it, but I could try.”

Heather’s snuck a glance at her. “Sorry. I forgot about your sire.” 

“It’s okay. I didn’t really know the guy anyways.” 

It was an awkward end to the conversation, but the silence was significantly more comfortable afterwards. 

~*~*~*~

It was easy enough to teach Heather how to see auras, but thaumaturgy presented… not insignificant challenges. It had come easily enough to her when she’d been turned, but either she just had an aptitude for it that Heather lacked—an explanation the self-loathing part of her was more than happy to accept—or it was something that came out instinctively when you actually needed it, and not when your dumbass sire (who had learned everything she knew about teaching from Yoda) tried to give you half-assed sage advice about it.

In retrospect, starting the training session off by telling Heather that she had such sights to show her was both tone deaf and tempting fate. 

“Okay,” she said, after they’d pissed away most of the night and accomplished precisely jack shit. “Pretend I’m coming after you with a stake.” 

“I’d be more worried that you’d trip and stake yourself,” Heather replied, but she obligingly concentrated. It was easy to tell when she was concentrating, because she made the most ridiculous face, all scrunched up like a bad actor on a TV show who didn’t know how else to indicate to the audience that they were doing psychic things. 

“Does the constipated face help?” 

Heather’s face relaxed into a scowl. “You’re an asshole.” 

“Maybe you just can’t do it. I don’t really know how this all works. Maybe it’s just random.”

“Yeah,” Heather said, scrubbing her hands over her face. “Yeah, I guess. It’s not a big deal either way. I just don’t want any surprises, you know?”

They called it a night. Or day, whatever. 

Heather overslept, and when the fledgling tried to wake her a little after sundown, she found herself doubled over next to the bed, puking up blood onto the ugly carpet. _So that’s how it feels,_ she thought.

When her stomach finally stopped heaving she sat down hard, room spinning so that she barely missed dropping onto the puddle of blood, and when she looked up Heather was frozen on the bed, eyes huge, one hand over her mouth and the other held stiffly to her chest. 

“Was that me?” Heather asked in a tiny voice. 

The fledgling wiped her mouth with a shaking hand and tried to blink away the black spots that were ping-ponging merrily across her field of vision. “Pretty sure it was, yeah.” 

“God, I am so sorry. You grabbed my shoulder and it just kind of—“ 

“Yeah, you were sleeping pretty hard.” When Heather just kept staring at her like she was about to spontaneously combust, she added, “That means it’s cool. No harm done. Let’s just get our shit together and go, okay?”

They packed up in tense silence, Heather rushing to grab the fledgling’s bag for her even though it was clear that no lasting damage had been done. At least, nothing that wouldn’t be healed up after breakfast. 

“Okay, I’m willing to write that one off as a learning experience, but I need to get a handle on this,” Heather said, eyes never leaving the road. “That can’t happen again.” 

“You’ll figure it out,” the fledgling said. “Besides, I’m the only one around. You can’t really hurt me, not permanently. I can handle it.” 

Heather’s jaw tightened. “That doesn’t make it better. Just because it won’t kill you doesn’t mean you should have to deal with it. No one deserves that.” 

The fledgling told herself to say something, that if she paused for too long Heather would draw her own conclusions. But she wasted too much time telling herself to stop wasting time, and though she stared determinedly at her shoes she could feel Heather’s eyes on her. 

“Punishing yourself doesn’t make up for any of it,” Heather said. 

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“It looks that way from where I’m standing.” 

“You’re not standing, you’re sitting.”

“Just stop it for five seconds. Look, I don’t blame you for what’s happened. As far as I can tell, you were pretty much a pawn in all of this, and I really think you did the best with the hand you were dealt. But even if I did blame you, punishing yourself wouldn’t change my mind. It doesn’t benefit me in any way to see you suffer. It doesn’t change the past, and it makes me feel worse.” She paused for a breath, then added, “Or do what you want. Just don’t use me to do it.” 

Instead of responding, the fledgling turned up the radio. 

~*~*~*~

The end of the month found them in a diner a little past midnight. They weren’t the only patrons there, but it was pretty close; besides the bored-looking waitress and cook, there was a guy and a girl at the counter who looked like truckers, and a guy in a corner booth who looked like a college student. 

“Okay,” the fledgling said. “Time for the final test. Go up to the guy at that booth over there and tell him to do a sweet cartwheel. Those exact words.”

Heather couldn’t contain the surprised snort of laughter. “No! You’re just trying to make me look like an idiot.”

“I’m literally dead serious, here. March right up there and tell him to do it like you’re doing him a favor by telling him, like letting him know that his fly is down. Just because you have psychic powers doesn’t mean you need to be weird, Carrietta. Pretend you’re Obi-Wan. Better yet, pretend you’re Courtney Shayne. I don’t know if that’s how they teach you to do it officially or whatever, but I always pretend I’m Rose Mcgowan and it always works, I swear.” 

Heather heaved a put-upon sigh and slid out of the booth. “Can you please be ready to leave in case it doesn’t work? I don’t want to sit here with him staring at me like I’m a weirdo for the rest of the night.”

“You are a weirdo, though.”

She flipped her the bird as she stood and turned to approach the man, a gesture the fledgling returned cheerily. 

The fledgling rested her chin on her hand as she watched Heather walk up to the guy and start talking. She couldn’t hear what she was saying, but after a few minutes, Heather stepped back so that the guy could step woodenly out of the booth. He looked like an stringy underachiever who was surgically attached to his phone and had never so much as gone for a jog, but as she watched he executed a perfect cartwheel across the ugly tiling in the diner. Added a little flourish to the end, too. 

Heather was still standing by his seat, frozen and looking a little surprised that it had actually worked. The fledgling applauded, and that seemed to break the spell. The guy shook his head and gathered up his stuff to leave, and Heather hurried back to their booth with her head ducked, as if there was any chance no one had seen her. But when she sat down, a smile was starting on her face.

“That was pretty awesome,” she admitted. 

“Just remember it comes with great responsibility,” the fledgling said. She grinned when Heather reached across the table to shove her shoulder companionably. 

~*~*~*~

For awhile she thought they were settling into a good rhythm, that she might be able to adjust to this being her new normal. 

Then Heather came back from a dinner run covered in blood. She was supposed to have been out hunting deer—alone, because they were too close to California and didn’t want to show the fledgling’s face more than was necessary—but the blood on her face and shirt and hands smelled too good to be deer. 

“Jesus, what happened?” It came out harsher than she’d intended, but Heather didn’t seem to take offense.

“There was the woman hunting,” Heather said, sitting down hard onto the edge of the bed and running a shaking hand through her hair. “And I just…” 

Oh. “Is she dead?”

“No! God, no. I called an ambulance.”

“Okay,” the fledgling said, trying to sound calmer than she was. “Okay, that’s fine, then. But we have to go now, because other kindred are going to figure out what happened.” 

“I’m sorry,” Heather said. She still had one hand fisted in her hair, like she thought if she let go of herself she’d unravel completely. “I fucked up.”

“No,” the fledgling said. Once she opened her mouth, it all started spilling out like vomit. “No, this is my fault. I shouldn’t have let you go alone, I—I was the one who turned you, I was the one who pissed off the Prince, I… I fucked up, okay? This is not on you.”

Except Heather didn’t seem comforted by it. “What do you want me to say when you say things like that? Do you want me to comfort you, tell you it’s all okay, tell you I’m totally okay with the fact that you first ruined my life and then took it away from me?”

“I—“ 

“I’ve told you before that I don’t blame you for what’s happened, what’s still happening. As far as I’m concerned, you were dealt a shitty hand, the same as I was. But you’ve got to stop wallowing if we’re going to get through this. You don’t have to forgive yourself—God knows I don’t know if I’m going to be able to forgive myself for what I now have to do—but you have to figure out how to live with yourself.”

She locked herself in the bathroom, then, leaving the fledgling to sink down onto the edge of the mattress, feeling exhausted, as if she’d been the one yelling. 

~*~*~*~

The fledgling woke slowly. It felt like her eyelids had crusted shut, the way they used to back when she was human and her allergies were being even more of a bitch than they usually were, and it took her far too long to work them open because for some reason her arms felt too heavy to lift.

It took her even longer to realize that the reason why her limbs felt so heavy was because there was a fucking stake sticking out of her chest.

She was lying on a dirt floor in some kind of shack; there was a taped-up window, but moonlight was filtering in through the decaying wood walls. If she didn’t get out by sunup, she’d be in a bad way. The walls probably wouldn’t let in enough sunlight to kill her, but at the very least it’d hurt like hell. 

She didn’t have long to contemplate the futility of her situation, because soon after she woke up he captor showed himself. He was some hunter. If she was totally honest, she didn’t pay much attention to what the guy was saying. Blah blah unholy creature blah. All hunters sort of sounded the same. 

And she went right on assuming he was the same as all the others she’d encountered, right up until he pulled out a pair of pliers and and forced open her mouth. Apparently he was either some freaky collector as well as a hunter, or LaCroix had gotten sick of waiting for her to die and had let it slip to some hunters what she was.

Either way, it fucking hurt. Her one consolation was that her fang seemed to be giving him some trouble, but that just meant the whole process was getting drawn out too long. By the time he actually yanked it out, she was almost relieved. 

He was reaching for her other fang when he suddenly doubled over, retching up what seemed like half the blood in his body along with a few chunks of assorted viscera. Most of it splashed onto the fledgling’s chest, and she was so busy being disgusted (and hungry, and disgusted with herself for being hungry) that she didn’t even notice Heather had entered the shack until she’d yanked his head back and torn into his throat.

It was only once the guy had dropped for good that Heather seemed to remember that she hadn’t shown up just for dinner.

“Oh, God,” she said, one hand flying to cover her mouth, as if that made the blood covering her from nose to tits any less obscene. “For a minute I just—are you okay?” 

“Whoso pulleth out this stake,” the fledgling said. 

“Fuck. Right.” 

Heather knelt lightly beside her, moving quiet and gingerly like she hadn’t been tearing some guy’s throat out thirty seconds ago. She grabbed the stake and pulled it out carefully, concentrating so hard that she looked almost reverent, like it really was Excalibur. 

The second the tip of the stake cleared her chest, she could feel life—or what passed for it—flood back into her limbs, though she decided to give herself a few minutes before attempting to get up. 

“The rightwise queen, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. It came out weak, on the edge of hoarse, enunciation slightly fucked by her missing fang, and the worst part was that she couldn’t bring herself to care. The coppery taste of her own blood wouldn’t leave her mouth, and she kept running her tongue over the empty socket where her fang used to be. She kept thinking about what undeath would be like if it didn’t grow back in, what would happen if she lost the other one. All she could picture was a future spent lurking in dark alleys, ready to jam a crazy straw into a rat. 

Heather’s mouth twisted, and she threw the stake hard across the room. It hit the window with a horrible crunching noise before bouncing off and clattering impotently to the floor; if the window hadn’t been taped up, it would have shattered. 

“How long do we have until sunrise?” the fledgling asked, finally pushing herself up on her elbows. 

“Long enough,” Heather said. 

“Awesome.” After a moment, she added, “Give me a boost?”

Heather grabbed her hands and hauled her to her feet. The room spun, but she didn’t let herself stumble. 

Before they left, she dug through his coat until she found her fang, then pocketed it. 

~*~*~*~

This was no way to live. She’d made her mind up about that, now. The fledgling had to deal with it because she was here through her own bad choices—no matter how extenuating the circumstances she’d made them under had been—but Heather was here through no fault of her own. If Heather had to live like this much longer, it would change her too much, and she would be forced to make decisions for which she would be responsible. And that was… the fledgling just couldn’t do that to her. Heather didn’t deserve to be put in that position, and the fledgling needed to believe that she could still do something decent with her life.

So the fledgling made the choice for her.

~*~*~*~

She’d wanted to leave while Heather was still asleep, had prepared a note and everything. But these days, Heather was even sharper than she was, and she woke up before the fledgling could even put her hand on the doorknob. 

“Where are you going?” Heather asked, sounding tired but not the slightest bit groggy.

Damn it. It seemed simplest to be honest. “Turning myself in.”

“Wait, what? You _can’t_.” Heather sat bolt upright, moving to swing her legs out of bed, and then got really mad when she realized she’d been handcuffed to the headboard. 

“You’ll be able to break out of those before anyone comes looking for you,” the fledgling said. “They still think they killed you; they don’t know you’re kindred now. There’s hair dye in the bathroom. If you change your hair and ditch your glasses, no one’s going to recognize you. You can just tell people you don’t remember your sire; that’s a common enough story that they’ll believe it.”

Heather yanked fruitlessly at the handcuff, then turned her furious gaze to the fledgling. “You can’t do this. It’s suicide.” The anger drained out of her face, replaced by the beginnings of a particular flavor of helpless dread that the fledgling herself had become all-too-familiar with since she’d been embraced. “You don’t care, do you? You can’t live with yourself anymore, so you’re going to let them end it for you.”

“They won’t necessarily kill me.”

“Oh, bullshit—“

“You told me I had to either forgive myself or figure out how I could live with myself. Well, I figured it out. It’s not like this, Heather.” She crossed the room and knelt at the side of the bed so that she was eye-level with Heather. “I have to do something to make it right. That’s how I live with it.”

For just an instant, Heather looked momentarily like she had back when she was a ghoul. She’d ceased her struggles against the handcuffs and was sitting calmly with her arms relaxed, her eyes wide and intense beneath her sleep-tousled hair. Then the fledgling felt the buzzing at the base of her skull and realized that Heather was trying to mind whammy her. 

“It doesn’t work against older vampires,” she told her quietly. 

Heather flinched guiltily and the buzzing stopped. 

“Not that I blame you for trying. I tried to Jedi mind trick my way out of a lot of things back when I first realized I could do it.”

Something shuttered closed behind Heather’s eyes. “If you really understood, you wouldn’t go. I know you feel guilty that you ruined my life or whatever else it is you think you’re responsible for, but what’s done is done, and the fact of the matter is that now I need you. I can forgive you for turning my life upside down. I can’t forgive you for walking out.”

“If you love something, let it go?” 

“I didn’t say I loved you. All I know is that I need you; I haven’t had time to figure out what that means.” 

“You still have to let me go.” 

Heather closed her eyes and let her head fall against the headboard, looking for all the world like she’d become a decade older in the past five minutes, though she’d already stopped aging. 

The fledgling reached out and smoothed a strand of hair off of Heather’s face and tried to quash the pang she felt in her chest when Heather leaned into the touch. “You know that I wouldn’t bother with atonement if it weren’t for you.” 

“That’s what got you into this mess, isn’t it?” Heather asked, smiling bitterly. “How can you make up for saving me by saving me?”

“I’m not making up for saving you. It’s—I’m making up for being selfish, okay? Sometimes we do the right thing for the right reasons and we still have to deal with the consequences.” She drew back her hand, then added, “There are a lot of things I’d change if I could go back in time and try again. Saving you isn’t one of them.”

“You don’t get it,” Heather said. The anger had left her face and voice, replaced by a dull resignation that the fledgling found a lot harder to stomach. “Your sire died. You never had to… you just can’t understand what it’s really like. It’s—it’s not like leaving home for college, or dealing with your parents dying. It’s like asking me to gut myself.” 

This time, the fledgling was the one to smile bitterly. “You’ve already been gutted.”

They both lapsed into silence, then, the fledgling because she was disgusted with herself, and Heather probably because she was disgusted with the fledgling. At the rate they were going, it was unlikely they’d reach an agreement before the sun rose. 

She wasn’t disgusted enough with herself to change her mind. “I could just leave,” she said. 

“I’d stop you.”

“And throw my sacrifice in the garbage?”

“You know what? You’ve already made your decision. Why are you dragging this out?”

“If I don’t do this, I’m going to take a walk at noon.” 

Heather flinched visibly, as if the fledgling had slapped her across the face. What she’d done was worse. She didn’t mean to say it—hadn’t even known she meant it, until the moment it came pouring out of her mouth like word vomit. It just made her feel even more like a piece of shit; she couldn’t even sacrifice herself without hurting Heather. 

The apology came rushing out of her mouth like even more word vomit. “I’m sorry,” she said. She stood up and backed away from the edge of the bed. Heather’s arms were lax, her hands limp in the cuffs, her expression frozen halfway between shocked and… something. Maybe pity, maybe anger. 

She didn’t stick around to find out. She turned and left, every step feeling like one taken in a dream, slow and heavy as wading through water. 

The door locked shut behind her and the spell broke and she leaned against it, almost involuntarily. If she were still human, she’d be struggling to breathe through the panic that had tightened across her chest like an iron band. Fuck fuck fucking fuck. 

She had to leave the car for Heather—and wouldn’t want to take it even if she could—so she walked past it and took a bus. The anxiety didn’t leave when she got to the bus stop, or when she climbed aboard, or when she took her seat, or when she sat stiffly for the hour or so it took to get to where she needed to go, trying not to think about the fact that the bus smelled faintly of old sweat and misery. 

It was only when she was standing in front of Venture Tower, poised to enter, that she felt calm again.

This was how she lived with it. 

She pushed open the front door and stepped into the lobby.


End file.
